Late last month, the Open Society Foundations announced three Africa-centered, multi-year grant programs whose goals are to promote democracy, support local advocacy around mineral rights, and center local people in peace-building efforts. The three initiatives will support work in approximately 12 countries, with one particularly troubled nation — the Democratic Republic of the Congo — receiving support under all of the new grantmaking efforts. OSF currently plans to spend from $340 to $350 million across the three programs.
The new funding isn’t OSF’s first effort targeting African nations since the grantmaker’s period of “transformation,” which it says was completed last year. That honor falls to last year’s launch of an eight-year, $400 million Economic and Climate Prosperity program focused on the Global South, including the African continent — and the funder announced new fellowships for the Global South’s public intellectuals just six days before the rollout of its new grantmaking programs.
But according to OSF’s Managing Director of Programs Brian Kagoro, the process OSF used to define what work to support through the new grant programs, and the focuses of the funding, represent a departure from the grantmaker’s previous ways of doing business. Kagoro spoke with IP from his office in South Africa.
“We realized that in the post-COVID moment, new realities were emerging” that challenged existing orthodoxies on development and traditional approaches to building democracy, Kagoro said. “We realized that a lot of work historically done by philanthropy, ourselves included, tended to focus on what we were unhappy with,” rather than investing in desired outcomes. OSF’s approach to building the new funds also centered impacted populations. As Kagoro put it, “What is it that the people that are most impacted want so that their identities and aspirations are not exclusively defined by the economic malaise, the political tragedies or oppression they face, but… by what it is that they would aspire for?”
What’s new about OSF’s approach in Africa?
A good part of the work that went into creating the three new programs — “Democratic Futures in Africa,” “Resources Futures in Africa” and “Transformative Peace in Africa” — sounds a lot like what one might expect. There were focus groups and site visits, “foresight exercises” and academic papers. But there were also aspects that stood out.
Kagoro said that, for one thing, OSF sought to let go of old assumptions. “Previously, we may have started with partners that we know because these are within established fields in the work on human rights [and] on social justice,” he said. “We may have started with countries that we thought were a priority. We may have started with research using the well-known researchers within those countries.” Instead, he said, the foundation cast a much wider net and proceeded “without any assumption on what would be the priorities” for OSF’s funding.
As a result, Kagoro said, the foundation dialed in on something new. One area that hadn’t previously been on its funding radar was the work around mining and minerals OSF is tackling through Resources Futures in Africa. Central Africa is the source of 30% of the world’s “critical minerals,” so called because of their importance to industries like clean energy. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone is currently responsible for more than 70% of the globe’s output of cobalt, a vitally important mineral for the production of everything from lithium-ion batteries for electric cars and renewable power grids to consumer electronics, orthopedic implants and agricultural products. The importance of these minerals, and the profits to be had from them, has reportedly led to the privatization of many African mines and a dependence on foreign investment in — and thus, foreign control of — the area’s mineral wealth, to the detriment of its residents.
“So whilst we had historically worked on debt and were working on trade, we had repeatedly missed the one area that would reshape the African continent’s relations with the rest of the world; but also the possibility of Africa becoming a significant player, developing on our own terms,” Kagoro said. The new Resources Futures in Africa grant program aims to give communities affected by the mines “a voice, a stake and a share in the benefits,” as Kagoro put it.
Something else that OSF hadn’t seen before, Kagoro said, are the ways in which young Africans are framing their engagement with power, politics and institutions. “Young people tended to frame much of what animated their engagement in terms of their socioeconomic rights. They tended to be concerned, and rightfully so, about questions of employment or jobs or opportunities,” he said.
What they aren’t concerned about, Kagoro said, are the divides around gender and particularly ethnicity that have burdened African peoples since European colonizers’ creation of artificial countries on the continent without regard for long-existing ethnic groups. Formerly, Kagoro said, African people “tended to organize around religion, the region they came from, or ethnicity,” tendencies that “made it easy to divide and rule, to divide and conquer” them. But when young people recently organized successful protests to end a finance bill in Kenya, for example, “they were actually more fundamentally reshaping mobilization and organization in society because they were not organizing on the basis of traditional social cleavages. They were organizing around a cause.”
Drawing on what OSF learned, all three programs “will prioritize African agency, grassroots organizing, and locally defined solutions to push for political inclusion, economic policies that benefit people, and community-rooted conflict resolution efforts, especially among youth, women and other historically excluded communities.”
Kagoro said that while the problems facing African peoples haven’t changed over the years, ideas about the best ways to support them have. This includes the role that funders should play, one where “philanthropy doesn’t assume that it catalyzes, but it assumes a more humble approach of accompaniment, and when necessary, amplification, and when necessary, linkage.”
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